NHS Bookmark Contest

The 9-12 National Honor Society has been working hard this semester to promote literacy for all K-12 students. They have come up with some really fun posters that are of teachers reading. During the end of April, they also sponsored a bookmark contest.

During library class, all students K-6 created a bookmark. The only requirement was that the bookmark would have a quote or saying about reading. I offered suggestions to the littlest K-1 students, and had older students look up quotes/sayings on their iPads or computers.

I loved seeing how creative our students got with this! They came up with some awesome designs. Each class then voted for their favorite bookmark, and then we had some NHS students and staff members vote for division finalists--our divisions were K-2, 3-4, and 5-6.

The individual classroom winners were:

Front: Jayson Kula, Taven Klein, Avery Wise

Middle: Phillip Hempstead, Ashton Ritze, Jessica Flansburg, Berit Levenhagen, Lucy Smith

Back: Elise Skelton, Harlee Holub, Keara Power, Lillie Kramer, Savannah Baker

Pictured below, Lexi Hennick:

The overall division winners were:

Elise Skelton

Keara Power

and Taven Klein.

Each classroom winner was awarded a certificate and will be receiving a free book of their choice. The three division winners are also having their bookmarks published for the entire elementary school. The bookmarks will be available before school is done on June 3.

It Looked Like Spilt Milk

One of my favorite projects that I do every year with 1st graders is to read a book called It Looked Like Spilt Milk and to create our own class book. It is a fun way for the kids to show their creativity and I'm always pleased with the results.

Here is our book this year:

Best Part of Me Poems

Our 5th graders wrote poems inspired by the book The Best Part of Me by Wendy Ewald as part of a collaboration between myself and our counselor, as they were talking about positive self-image during guidance time.

I think these poems turned out wonderfully, and really showcase our awesome students!

April Displays

The interactive push pin poetry bulletin board has been fun. We've got several poems now!

I like to put things in the hallway that catch middle/high school kids' attention. This Peeps board did just the trick. 

I've been meaning to do this for awhile, but finally got around to making them. The iPods have pictures of the new books we just got in. They really brighten up that corner!

Poetry Fun

The third graders had fun writing "I Am" poems. I got the template from One Extra Degree. We worked with the counselor to talk about positive self-image and brainstormed words for our poems. Then we copied them down, took pictures on our iPads & printed them out. The poems are hanging in the hallway with the pictures underneath. The poems don't have their names on them, so the kids had a fun time reading each other's work and trying to guess whose poem was whose! 

The 6th graders tried blackout poems for the first time. I copied a page from some popular books: Harry Potter, Catching Fire, and Savvy, and then showed the students how to black them out. First, we read the page and thought about words that stuck out to us. Then, we reread it and underlined or circled the words that we liked, and finally tried to put them together to make a poem that makes sense. Our last step was to black out everything that wasn't underlined. Some of these turned out really well! 

With the bulletin board that is in the library, I try to have something interactive. For poetry month, we are having pushpin poetry. As kids finish their work, they have different options that they can participate in, and this is one of them. Some of the 6th graders had a good time making poems!

One of my favorite things to do with poetry is to make poetry raps. I picked a poem for kindergarteners that had many sight words in it. We used the Promethean board to highlight sight words, and to circle words we didn't know. I also drew little illustrations next to the word in each line that changed. It's evident why I'm not an art teacher! Then, I read the poem aloud once. Students joined me in reading aloud a few times through. I had already created a beat in Garageband that we used to rap with. I played the music and we rapped the poem. Each time we read it, I increased the tempo in Garageband by 5 beats. It was a fun challenge to see how fast we could read!

The 4th graders spent some time writing acrostic poems. I love their themes! We brainstormed and used dictionaries to come up with words and phrases. I love these!

I know that these are kind of hard to see, but the kindergarteners wrote number list poems after reading a number poem about a circus. We split into two groups--one group wrote about what would go into the best pot of soup, and the other group wrote what would go into the worst soup ever. We've got candy, tomatoes, & cookies in one, and diapers, bricks, and bugs in the other! I love their creativity.

Tournament of Books Champion!

Last week we voted for the last time in our tournament of books & determined a winner! The K-3 students had a great time through the month of March reading Dr. Seuss books & learning more about the author.

Here is how our bracket started at the beginning of the month. The K-1 students read the books on the left side, and the 2-3 students read the right side. After reading each pairing, the students voted using a Google Form & I checked the winners and moved them along on our hallway display.

We had a K-3 awards ceremony scheduled, so I thought that would be the perfect way to announce the winner to all the students at the same time. I had one student from each grade level help me out. The K-1 students had voted The Cat in the Hat to advance to the final round, and the 2-3 graders had selected The Lorax.

The audience thought that The Lorax would win, and they were right! The Lorax won 98-22 over The Cat in the Hat. I thought it would've been a closer vote, but I was wrong!

And here it is moved over on the hallway bracket. We crowned the champion! All the students were given a Dr. Seuss pencil, bookmark, sticker, or eraser based on grade level as a reward for participating and helping celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday all month long!

Press Here

To wrap up our reading of the Iowa Goldfinch Award nominees, we read Press Here by Henre Tullet. I don't think I fully appreciated the magic of this book until I saw how students reacted to it. They were in love with the concept of the book and everyone wanted to participate. We passed the book around and students took turns doing each page.

Then, the first and second graders worked on making their own pages of a book using Keynote on their iPads. They used the shapes and transitions to make it look like things happened when you pressed what their instructions told.

These were super fun to play with on the iPads. I created a movie with them, because it is hard to get the effect of pressing on the computer. The video shows how they used transitions to create their effect, but it was lots more fun on the iPads where you could actually tap the shapes.

Overall, I was super impressed by these!

Tournament of Books

In the spirit of March Madness, we are hosting a tournament of books in grades K-3. Since March is when we celebrate Dr. Seuss, we've created a bracket using 16 of his books. The kindergarten and first grade is completing one side of the bracket, and the second and third are reading the other side. After reading both books, we use a simple Google Form linked from a QR code to vote on which book students liked better.

We put the bracket on our bulletin board in the library:

And here is the bracket displayed in the hallway:

And here are the results after the Sweet 16 round:

Books that moved on from the K-1 bracket: Hop on Pop, Green Eggs & Ham, The Foot Book, The Cat in the Hat

Books left behind in the K-1 bracket: Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, Fox in Socks, There's a Wocket in My Pocket

Books that moved on from the 2-3 bracket: Horton Hears a Who, The Lorax, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Sneetches

Books left behind in the 2-3 bracket: Oh The Thinks You Can Think, Bartholomew and the Oobleck, Oh the Places You'll Go, Yertle the Turtle

Two of these books were decided by one vote: Green Eggs and Ham and Horton Hears a Who just squeaked out the victory!

This week the books will compete in the Elite 8 round and our champion will be crowned the following week!

5/6 Olympics Projects

During the Olympics this February, the 5th & 6th graders created pages about a specific sport that they were interested in knowing more about. We used a website called Smore to create the pages. Smore allows students to drag and drop items into their page easily.
We had several shortened classes and missed some classes because of all of our snow & cold days, so not everyone got a project finished. However, the ones that were finished look really cool! I love the Olympics and the kids really enjoyed getting to know more about each sport. They had recently taken a skiing trip, so they knew a bit about how hard being an Olympic athlete is. The students were also impressed that a group of teachers went to a curling lesson!

Click here to see the Pinterest board of completed projects.

Greek Mythology Fun

For the past few weeks, fourth graders have been reading and researching about gods and goddesses from Greek mythology. Not all of them were 100% excited until they started reading about their chosen god/goddess and making connections with how they were related to other students' gods. It was so funny to hear students telling others that they were their wife/husband or that they threw someone else in to the sea. They thought it was hilarious and it was really engaging, plus it helped the students makes connections in their learning.

As their main source of information, students used Britannica online. The table below is from Britannica. The students were able to look at this table, see a glimpse of what each god was all about, and choose one based on their own interest. A student interested in hunting would choose Artemis, while a student interested in music might choose Apollo.

After choosing who they wanted to research, they clicked on the orange hyperlink to go to that article. Another thing I love about Britannica is that it will read the article aloud. Some of my students wanted to read it, but others like to listen. This was especially nice for some of the students who had longer articles, as well as for some who needed help pronouncing some of the words. Who doesn't need help pronouncing some of those names!?

While reading or listening students were taking notes. We worked on breaking the articles down into paragraphs and determining the main idea and supporting details from each paragraph. This is what our notes looked like:

The next step was for students to use iClipArt to find pictures that matched their research. Each students goal was to find 8-10 pictures. After we found pictures, we put them into iMovie on our iPads and recorded our voices over the pictures. Then, we made a Keynote slide to use as a title page and we were finished.

I am so proud of how these movies turned out. All of the students were engaged, interested, and created an awesome final product to show their learning. We had a fun class period watching these to celebrate! 

Library Displays

Basically, I create a Pinterest board, and my library associate, Jennifer makes everything happen. I am going to be lost when she is gone for maternity leave in a couple of weeks!

Here are some of our current displays:

I love these signs, and the kids have had a good time quizzing each other on which places belong to which books and talking about which place they'd go if they could pick one.

Many of our classes are learning about the Olympics right now, and this is our medal count wall. Our goal is to update daily, but we're already running out of space!

This is incredibly hard to see, but it says, "Are you a library book, 'cause I'm checkin' you out!"

Our "Read Box" where everything is free. The humor of this was lost on most of the kids, but several of them got it.

This one is actually taken down now, but I'm not sure I ever shared it before. I try to put things to attract older students in this case since the high school students walk past this, but may never step foot into the library.